Daily Tip For Hotel Housekeeping – As I leave a hotel, various excuses pass through my head not to tip the housekeeper. I am in a hurry. I have no money. Will the maid who folded my clothes get the money? Why can’t I just add a tip to the credit card bill and charge it?
About 70% of hotel guests go through the same mental exercise and end up not tipping. A waiter would have to spit in your soup, and you would have to see him do it, to stiffen him up. The cleaning ladies are stiff every day. I’ve heard all the reasons why guests treat hotel employees so differently from other service employees, but I haven’t heard a good one.
Daily Tip For Hotel Housekeeping
I have more than a passing interest in the subject. For 10 years my grandmother, Nellie O’Connor McCreary, was a chambermaid at the Washington Hotel, now the W Hotel. If you lean over the railing of her rooftop bar after a drink or two, you’d swear you could see the Oval Office.
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She would never see that bar, and I never would have seen it under the stairs, if it weren’t for living with her in a two-bedroom bungalow during the summers when I was interning in Washington, D.C. was a perfect situation: I didn’t always get along with my mother, and she didn’t always get along with her daughter, but we got along perfectly well. On top of that, the room was free. So were the stories.
One in particular left a lasting impression. At one of our weekly dinners after work at Reeve’s Bakery near the hotel, my grandmother pulled out a crispy 10, a tip she had received after a week’s stay from Clare Boothe Luce, the author, ambassador and congresswoman, and a regular guest. until she moved to Watergate when it was a building, not a metaphor, in the mid-1970s.
Treated my grandmother, a fellow Catholic and admirer of Roosevelt, like an Irish central distribution maid rising through the household ranks rather than someone making beds for minimum wage. Despite Luce’s misconception and admiration for Nixon, they got along well.
Luce was averse to profiteering and believed that others should tip like her. She had an idea: ask each maid to leave a note on a pretty card next to the mint on the pillow, hoping that the stay was pleasant, and to wait for the tips to flow. Luce then jotted down a note that Nellie should deliver to management. , co-signed by his “colleagues”, asking that a line be added to the bill for a tip, like the one that exists for waiters.
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The comparison with the waiters was appropriate; they earn an average annual salary of around $30,000 and housekeepers around $25,000. To make her point, the patrician playwright re-enacted her daily encounter with room service. The floor server (usually an he) rolls a breakfast cart around the room, removes the silver dome, then hangs around while your poached eggs freeze – unfolding the napkin with panache, removing the paper hat orange juice, folding the napkin – to give you time to add a tip on top of the automatic 18% tip.
He then leaves, leaving behind a mess. On the same principle that no one washes a rental car, few customers clean up after eating. So the housekeeper (it’s usually a woman) will stack the dishes, put the cart in the hallway, clean up the toast crumbs, then do the rest of her work of stripping the beds, picking up the extra pillows on the floor, wiping the butter stains off the remote and leaving the bathroom, now with coffee spills, shiny. Don’t blame the waiters for their tips, but why does he have two lines on the bill and the housekeeper has none?
My grandmother’s reenactment of the reenactment didn’t mean she would do anything about it. You might as well have asked him to climb the Washington Monument and write an essay about it. But his admiration for Luce was less a response to her grand scheme than to the attention. The hotel job wasn’t necessarily a step back from her previous job, but it was a world apart to work as a nurse’s aide for 20 years at St. Elizabeth’s, a federal mental hospital overlooking the city. She became invisible, mostly interacting with a mop. There was no one to stop to dance, no one to sit down, not much at all. The first rule of
It would be decades before someone else would look at a housekeeper and see a wrong that needed to be righted. Maria Shriver, the founder of A Woman’s Nation, was inspired not by a family member scrubbing bathtubs, but by the sight of housekeepers – mostly minorities, many immigrants – working like borrowed mules with an 80-mile commute or more in the several hotels she stayed in after splitting from Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2014. There were no Cinderella stories where an eighth-floor maid was invited to train for a job first. It’s a job where a girl could use a tip.
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The former California first lady met Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain, and persuaded him to promote tipping with a catchy Hollywood name, “The Envelope Please.” Marriott placed packages in 160,000 rooms with space for the housekeeper to write a message next to the hotel about how “the hard work of our caring attendant is often overlooked”.
, a phrase, moreover, perhaps invented by the playwright Luce. Instead of cash, the envelopes were filled with notes asking why a multi-billion dollar corporation wasn’t paying its aide a living wage, commemorated in this
That’s why the second largest channel would barely touch the subject. Hilton spokesperson Nigel Glennie told me the Marriott experience was the first thing he was told when he joined the company. “The custom and practice of tipping is very local,” he said, “and with Hiltons in 113 countries and territories,” there would be no way to standardize it. But, he added, “there’s nothing stopping you or me from leaving a tip beside the bed.”
But there is something stopping people, and the hospitality industry knows it. If not, why do hotels already have a queue for waiters and at their resort properties have they added one for housekeeping?
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Props to Marriott for the effort, but now, like other hotels, it’s going in the opposite direction. The industry launched a program supposed to save the environment; it has the perhaps not entirely incidental benefit of allowing hotels to reduce their housekeeping expenses, their biggest labor cost. First, they incentivized guests to save the environment with a “green” option, in which guests could choose not to wash their sheets every day. With customers softening, hotels have moved on to a purely self-serving marketing ploy, still with “green” in its name, offering rewards points or other perks for ditching housekeeping altogether. It cost the industry virtually nothing. Housekeepers, however, found themselves with about 350 fewer full-time jobs, 700,000 fewer hours and rooms left unattended for three days shoveling.
Enter Unite Here, the nation’s largest hospitality workers’ union. It hopes for tips and respect for all of its 270,000 workers, but gave up counting on that, or a living wage, in 2018. With the motto “One job should be enough”, workers have embarked on the largest multi-city strike in history, coming out of 23 properties in eight cities, from the St. Francis in San Francisco to the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.
It was a big risk for the union: it is always harder to keep unpaid workers on strike than to replace them with management so that they make bad beds. One of the tropes that holds the good ones back is that we can all do housework, but we just don’t want to.
Within weeks, Marriott offered varied settlements, averaging about $4 an hour over four years, as well as more full-time jobs with predictable shifts. For a while, housekeeping gained an invaluable degree of public visibility and appreciation, through wet towels, funky smells, angry guests and canceled conventions. They are the lowest paid employees in the industry who, one day at a time, make a hotel a home.
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In 1980, my grandmother took her second retirement, moving to a house in Pennsylvania near my parents. Reversed positions, she visited me (and her great-granddaughter) and only asked me to keep her stocked with the right colors of thread for her project to embroider 50 state flowers on 50 pillowcases pillow cases, as well as Murphy’s Oil Soap and a box for donations to Goodwill. A week and my house looked like Marie Kondo had come for a holiday.
When she died in 1985, she left a box in her dresser with postcards from Luce and the letter she composed. My grandmother left me the appreciation of a tidy house, of a family that kills
When I left the Sheraton in March, I left a
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